Martyna Marciniak

At a time when images can be produced and manipulated on a massive scale, Martyna Marciniak explores the diverse forms of visual influence and their political, economic and social impacts. In Anatomy of Non-Fact, the artist examines the fragile boundary between reality and fiction, truth and deception.
The exhibition focuses on digitally falsified and AI-generated images, such as that of Pope Francis wearing a coat from the fashion brand Balenciaga – a supposed photo that went viral on social media and gained widespread attention. The artist dissects these images, analyzes the underlying data and deconstructs their substance. Like a forensic scientist, she explores the visual “anatomy” of the so-called “non-facts” and decodes the complex processes and mechanisms underlying them.
Martina Marciniak reveals the influence of synthetic images on our collective understanding of truth. In doing so, she poses the central question of what form knowledge and reality take and how they are transformed and reshaped through manipulation.

Martyna Marciniak (*1991 in Poznań, Poland) graduated from the Bartlett School of Architecture in London in 2017. She has worked as an exhibition designer and was a researcher at Forensic Architecture from 2018 to 2021. She has also worked for Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. She was an artist in residence at the Bauhaus Foundation Dessau (2018) and at the Akademie Schloss Solitude (2024). Her work has been shown at Ars Electronica, the Warsaw Biennale, Kinema ICON, Bucharest, Haus Gropius, Dessau, and the deTour Festival, Hong Kong, among others. She lives and works in Berlin.

Curators: Hannah Eckstein and Marisa Zeising